This book provides a suspenseful exploration of the conflictual relationship between Sigmund Freud and Girindrasekhar Bose, the first president (as of 1921) of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society and the most prominent promoter, though also contester and complicator, of Freudian ideas in South Asia from the 1920s to the 1940s.

• Acknowledgments


• List of Figures


• Preface


• 1. Introduction: Beginnings of Tension and Drama in the Freud-Bose Correspondence


• 2. Restoration of the Bose-Freud Correspondence: Light Shed on its First Two Phases from Freud's 1923-37 Correspondence with Romain Rolland, and a Missed Chance to Compare Views on the Preoedipal


• 3. Unraveling of the Bose-Freud Correspondence, with More Light Shed


• from the Freud-Rolland Correspondence and from Freud's 1933-34 Work with H. D.


• 4. Opposite Wishes


• 5. Freud, Bose, and the 'Maternal Deity'


• 6. The Oedipus Mother


• 7. The Party, the Guests, and Why Visnu Ananta-Deva


• 8. Thinking Goddesses, Mothers, Brothers, and Snakes with Freud and Bose


• 9. The Oceanic Goddess in the Gift to Freud


• Bibliography

Alf Hiltebeitel is Professor of Religion at George Washington University. He works mainly on the two Sanskrit epics, the Mah¿bh¿rata and Ramayana, and on the south Indian Draupadi cult, which worships the Mahabharata's leading heroine as the Goddess. He is a historian of religions who studies Hinduism with longstanding interests in Sigmund Freud and in the comparative study of Judaism.